Category: Reflections

The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.

        from Good Bones by Maggie Smith

In 2017, when the poet-sensation Maggie Smith broke the Internet with her poem, “Good Bones,” the world was, according to the poem, in horrible shape. Nine years later, the situation isn’t looking dramatically better. Or better at all. Perhaps I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope, but from where I stand, the good things are seeming even further away.

“Good Bones” uses the metaphor of a real estate agent “chirping on” optimistically about a “real shithole” to illuminate how urgently we need to sell our children on the world:

This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

While sugar-coating the truth is rarely the right course of action, it’s surely important to give young people reason to feel hopeful despite the dumpster fire we’re living through.

The concept of selling our children the world calls to mind the award-winning film La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful). Starring Roberto Benigni, who also directed the film, it faced reasonable criticism for sentimentalizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, La vita è bella remains a poignant tragicomedy, revealing the extraordinary lengths to which a father will go to shield his child from the psychological impact of trauma.

How do we show the next generations that we love this place, and our place in it? Despite all the ways we sabotage our planet’s future, I know we want to leave them a healthy, peaceful world. I am struck by the American poet Matthew Olzmann, whose poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” ruefully claims:

Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.

It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.

Olzmann was writing this in 2017, around the same time “Good Bones” appeared. I am not a mathematician, but when the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that between nineteen and twenty-three million tonnes of plastic waste enter aquatic ecosystems each year, even I know things are grimmer than when Olzmann penned this poem nearly a decade ago.

But, we love this place, Earth. Right? We don’t seem to be a species with much foresight, but surely we love this place. How can art remind me that not all is lost?

So many poets point the way by encouraging readers to spend time in nature, where we can come to know ourselves and our other-than-human kin.

Denise Levertov celebrates

this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky

        (Levertov, 1984)

***

Wendell Berry invites us to lie down by a still lake,

where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

        (Berry, 1968)

***

Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us of the hope of dawn, and how in nature lives

the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

        (Hopkins, 1877)

***

There is no shortage of poetry selling us the world by honouring her natural elements. And, it would be absurd for me to say I don’t agree with the poets. These are poems I return to again and again, for their concise and stunning descriptions of nature’s power, mystery, beauty, and endurance.

But, as I think of things I love on a planet that we have brought to the edge of extinction, and though I feel sorrow for the way we have plundered her resources, it isn’t nature that I mourn first. After all, she will reassert herself after we are gone. She has before, as we know.

When Earth suffered a global mass extinction 60 million years ago (give or take a few million years), many forests died, food chains collapsed, and somewhere in the range of three-quarters of the world’s species went extinct. (Or so I’m told; just as I am no mathematician, I am no scientist.)

But slowly—oh so slowly—once the dust settled and the sunlight returned, plants began spreading over the barren earth. Then shrubs and trees. Eventually, mature forests developed once again. Over millions of years, novel ecosystems emerged and paved the way for humans to walk the earth.

If we evolve again, will we reproduce the uniquely creative forms of expression that characterize our species? Below are just some of the artistic and magical things that bring me glimmers of joy and expectation—enough to allow me to sell the world to our children in good conscience.

1. The hush of anticipation the moment before the theatre curtain rises. A collective human body holds its breath, willingly suspends its disbelief, and waits for the magic to begin.
2. The thunderous applause and shouts of wonder as a principal actor walks on stage after a performance to take their first bow.
3. The sound of the first violinist tuning the orchestra. Whether an orchestra perfectly tunes to the concertmaster is not of primary importance to me, a non-musician. I love the ritual, signalling the performance is about to begin.
4. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. A blog on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra website refers to this composition’s “haunting resonance” and “indelible mood,” and I don’t have better words to describe it.
5. Judi Dench’s affecting and plaintive interpretation of “Send in the Clowns,” from Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical A Little Night Music.

I could go on and on. I’ve barely touched the surface. What about Cecil Beaton’s portraits? What about Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray? But, I must stop somewhere, and so I draw to a close with a single moment from the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott.

When all seems lost for the movie’s intrepid antiheroes, the women don’t give up. With the top down on their 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible, the women drive towards. Towards what, you ask? Towards agency. Towards freedom. “Let’s keep going,” Thelma says, and Louise smiles in agreement.

Bibliography

Berry, W. (1968). The peace of wild things. In Openings. Harcourt, Brace & World.

Hopkins, G. M. (1877). God’s grandeur. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved July 7, 2026, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur

Levertov, D., & Joubert, J. (1984). Oblique Prayers: New Poems with 14 Translations from Jean Joubert. New Directions.

Olzmann, M. (2017, April 14). Letter to someone living fifty years from now. Academy of American Poets. Retrieved July 7, 2026, from https://poets.org/poem/letter-someone-living-fifty-years-now

Smith, M. (2017). Good bones. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved July 7, 2026, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones

It is a commonly held notion that there is nothing we cannot buy to make ourselves feel better. From glow-in-the-dark toilet paper (Glow with the flow!) to canned unicorn meat (Tastes like rainbows and stardust!), our dampened spirits need only look to the Internet to realize that the road to happiness, health, and good fortune can be easily purchased and delivered right to our door.

Many skeptics of modern wellness culture—and I count myself among them—tend to look askance at anything marketable that promises to enhance one’s life in any material, physical, or spiritual way. It’s not that we’re scornful about wellness itself. Instead, we tend to question the reliability and authenticity of ‘purchasable health’, whether in the form of biohacking gadgets (‘Fitbits are only fit for landfill!’ the sceptics cry) or influencer-endorsed self-care products (‘Doja Cat can’t make MAC cruelty-free!’ they exclaim).

Our hearts aren’t two sizes too small. To the contrary, cynics like me celebrate evidence-based wellness-enhancing activities that are low-cost or, better yet, free. Volunteering at community events, engaging in lighthearted exercise (nothing too strenuous or expensive, naturally), and taking long, hot showers (please, no thoughts about water waste) all earn our—sometimes reluctant—approval.

My greatest tonic is learning, and there are innumerable free ways to do this, thanks to the World Wide Web—and public libraries, of course. Wellness-culture doubters like me also often embrace engaging with the arts as a legitimate source of pleasure, healing, and emotional growth. Visiting museums (especially free ones), reading novels, and listening to music are just a few examples of meaningful arts-based activities that support well-being.

All that said, there is a special brand of skeptics—and I counted myself among them—who extend their disdain for wellness culture when it trespasses on the hallowed sphere of art. Or rather, Art. When spelled with a capital A, Art comprises those books, films, plays, statues, paintings, and so on that should be taken seriously. Their aesthetic powerdemands that they be approached with reverence and a steely intellectualism.

Forgetting that the self-styled aesthete par excellence,Oscar Wilde, referenced his position in the gutter, these Art-lovers place themselves squarely in the stars. (For those who don’t venerate Oscar Wilde, as I do, I am referencing a quote from his smash-hit play from 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which Lord Darlington says, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. Sound familiar? You might also know it from the British Rock band, The Pretenders, where Chrissie Hynde belted it out in ‘Message of Love’ in 1981.

Such art devotees are strongly guarded against drawing on the arts to ‘feel better’. Art therapy? [Sneer.] Thank you, no. Protesting the happiness-through-the-arts industry, these cynics reject art for wellness’ sake while dousing themselves in art for art’s sake. 

Not inherently a bad thing to do. The Art for Art’s Sake movement, sometimes called Aestheticism, began in 19th-century France, but this self-consciously styled rebellion against the moral stranglehold on art and wider societal structures soon made its way to England. There, those who embraced Aestheticism roundly rejected the moralism that nailed firmly into place such enduring harms as restrictive gender norms, sexual shame and stigma, the moralization of poverty, and the equation of respectability with virtue.

To aesthetes (I still count myself among them, though with numerous rigorous qualifications and provisos), art (Art) is inherently valuable, independent of its subject matter or moral, political, ethical, or social weight. As my acting professor used to quip, You want to send a message? Call Western Union! In other words, don’t lean on art to do your heavy lifting.

So, what are my qualifications and provisos, you might ask? Chief among them is that art is indeed inherently valuable, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be drawn on for insight, learning, and—dare I say it?—healing. In this way, art exists both for its own sake and for wellness’ sake.

How might those who embrace an ‘art as therapy’ approach spend time with Art in its many forms: written, spoken, sculpted, sung, painted, or danced, to name a few? Here, I invite you to bring to mind a great masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic Mona Lisa. 

How might I engage with this painting at the level of human emotion? To look at this masterpiece can be unsettling. The Lady Lisa's eyebrows have disappeared over the centuries (if they were ever there at all), and in such a peaceful setting, her mysteriously shifting smile seems almost sinister. What is she smiling at, and where, and at whom? 

I might print (or sketch) a version of the painting and return Mona Lisa's eyebrows to her, creating a backstory to how they were lost. I might add other attributes to her face to give myself a clearer understanding of who the sitter was and what relationship she had with the painter, and now has with the viewer. Or perhaps I could add some colour that makes the background a little less serene. A little funkier. A little more something-that-speaks-to-me. 

In creating a relationship with the prima donna of the art world—in giving visual form to the thoughts and emotions the painting invokes—I have grown to understand the painting’s power, but also something of myself. The choices I make, the stories I invent, and the questions I ask reveal my own ways of seeing. I have learned something about myself by reflecting on how I respond to something external to myself.

And more than that, the act of doing—of clipping papers, choosing stickers, imagining settings and stories, perceiving new landscapes, of being in relationship with great art—may itself be healing. The value lies not only in what I discover but in the process of discovery. Perhaps by exploring the mysteries of the Mona Lisa—and my response to them—I can come to understand myself a little better. I might emerge from the work feeling braver. Bolder. Ready to face the world.  

Heaven forbid! cry le Club d' Art for Art’s Sake. You’ve missed thepoint! The full benefits of the Mona Lisa can only be experienced by the educated elite. (For the thousands of ‘humble' tourists queued up to view this famous lady, just ignore the aesthetes’ wailing. It might get in the way of your pleasure.)

I know I sound attitudinal, but I am as much in this camp as the other, while eschewing snobbery and elitism. I feel and know about art like I feel and know about wine: I appreciate how a specific terroir shapes each vintage. How a skilled vintner takes pride in balancing vibrant acidity with structured tannins. I understand how to luxuriate in wine’s complex, layered aromas and elegant finish. 

But, I refuse to speak about wine in any of these terms, and I rarely drink it with such seriousness. Instead, my general response to a mouthful of wine is, ‘That was delicious!', sometimes said while the liquid is still running down my gullet, causing a mighty slosh and slush of sound and fury somewhere in the back of my throat and then an inelegant splash of fugitive wine on the countertop or floor (or worse, the host’s white blouse).

This isn’t to say I don’t revere wine, or art. In fact, both have the capacity to move me from the mundane to the sublime. 

What do I mean by the sublime? The sublime is the emotional or spiritual experience of encountering something so vast, powerful, or beautiful that it lifts us beyond the ordinary and fills us with awe, wonder, and sometimes even terror. These feelings would be overwhelming if we physically inhabited the worlds art presents—if we were drowning in Bruegel the Elder's Storm at Sea, for example, or trapped in the uncanny silence and expansive emptiness of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. 

But because we experience them from a position of safety, the terror, desolation, and oppression they evoke become, paradoxically, sources of pleasure.

To consider this further, let’s take Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834 edition). The ‘story’ isn’t important for this exercise. The imagery on its own brings the reader an experience of the sublime. Below are the lines the Ancient Mariner speaks when he meets a spectral woman who wins his soul. Read them out loud, if you can.

The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

My physical self doesn’t want to get anywhere close to that wild sea and otherworldly woman. Yet, from the safe space of my reading chair (named Sybil, for those who want to know), I drown myself in the atmosphere the poetry evokes. I experience again and again the delicious terror of the sailor's ghastly visitor, surrounded by a sea of flame. Reading it does me great good.

What do I mean by ‘does me great good’? Imagine that every work of art came with a nutrition label, much like the ones found on food packaging. Instead of listing calories, protein, or fibre, the label would indicate the emotional and spiritual nourishment the work provides, along with the percentage of our recommended daily allowance (RDA) of various experiences. By way of example, here is what a day spent absorbing Coleridge’s haunting, hallucinatory poem might provide:

Awe: 88% RDA
Terror: 28% RDA
Ecstasy: 64% RDA
Transcendence: 52% RDA
Melancholy: 21% RDA
Mystery: 76% RDA

These are nutritional benefits I can digest. If art stuns me with its greatness, beauty and power; if it lifts me beyond my daily concerns; if it fills me with exhilaration or, conversely, a reflective sadness; or if it leaves me with a sense of itself being beyond comprehension, it has done some great things. Might I even say (ahem), it has contributed to my wellness?

And this is the point I have been aiming to make all along, and the one I want to invite us all to ponder: art, even when appreciated for its inherent value, has a healing power.

I offer a second invitation: Please consider joining one or both of Art & Humanity's September events. The first, on Sept. 13, is a workshop entitled Broken is Beautiful. This event is for those in the ‘Mona Lisa for Wellness’ camp. The second, on Sept. 27, is a lecture—The Poetics of Failure. This lively talk is aimed at those in the ‘art for art's sake’ camp (but be warned: it may still have a healing power). Information about each event and the links to register are at the top of this newsletter, but you can also click on the hot pink text in this paragraph.

I close this reflection not with the roaring sublime of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but rather with the silent, still sublime of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which describes the speaker's experience while hiking through the Alps:

… when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

See you in September. In the meantime, seek out some art, for wellness' sake!

Not so very long ago, when the lands where I live were encased in ice and the branches of all the deciduous trees were bare, I spotted three bright green leaves atop a pile of snow. I was amazed. I don’t believe in signs or miracles, but I want to believe in magic, and it felt as though some Faerie Realm—overlaid on our world and often obscured—was shimmering through.

Trees always possess some magic, even when they are unadorned. When they burst into a riot of innumerable greens, the spirit, dampened by snow mould, starts to flutter and unfurl. Nowhere is this more true than in wintry climates where the days grow long well before the temperatures climb above freezing.

Growing up in British Columbia, I know more about coniferous trees than deciduous ones. The forests of my childhood were made up of Douglas-Firs, Red Cedars, and Western Hemlocks. When I first moved to Ontario as a university student, I was captivated by the colours of the region’s sugar maples and red oaks, but I longed for the silvery blue shades, prehistoric ferns, and immense trunks of my home province.

I was many years into adulthood before I understood that the woods of everywhere else weren’t puny. It was rather that the forests of the West Coast boasted some of the largest, tallest trees on the planet.

That these trees are under threat is no secret, but it is something to continue to hammer home—which brings me back to my opening story.

It turns out the mysterious leaves were not, after all, from a Faerie Realm. Indeed, they were not even leaves. At least, not real ones. To my dismay, they were polyester. Instead of nourishing the earth, they were contributing to its decay. Pure rubbish masquerading as organic life.

So much that glistens green carries the seed of ruin. Those polyester leaves are a tiny part of a bigger picture of manufacturing processes that consume stupendous amounts of energy and emit greenhouse gases, producing plastics that can take decades to decompose. We are choking the earth with our waste.

American poet Matthew Olzmann contemplates what we are leaving future generations in his poem, 'Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now':

It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.

Ours isn’t the first global climate disruption, but it is the fastest and the most human-driven—and it could be the last one our species will see. Humans have been bungling the health of the land for some time, of course, but until the Industrial Revolution, most human activity affected local or regional environments.

In the late sixteenth century, for example, England and Scotland were struck with a series of environmental catastrophes directly linked to human activity: natural resources were being extracted intensively as landscapes were increasingly plundered to meet the people's growing demands. As a result, famine devastated the population while disease spread rapidly, driving death rates to alarming levels.

By 1603, as the House of Tudor gave over to the House of Stuart, London was showing signs of what we would now recognize as environmental degradation: polluted air, mismanaged land and waterways, and mounting pressure from rapid urban growth. The capital’s voracious appetite for resources reshaped the country, exploiting forests, fields, and waterways far beyond the city itself.

Shakespeare gives voice to these environmental crises in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In her rebuke of the Fairy King Oberon, the formidable Fairy Queen Titania describes a deep climatological disorder: the air grown thick and unwholesome, floods overtaking the fields, livestock wasting, the seasons wandering off course, and sickness rising among humans as the natural world falls out of tune. Read it out loud, if you can:

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here.
No night is now with hymn or carol blessed.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world
By their increase now knows not which is which. (Act 2, Sc. 1)

What is more, Titania takes responsibility for the crisis, attributing it to the discord between herself and Oberon:

this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original. (Act 2, Sc. 1)

If only we were all so self-aware.

Of course, so often the least mindful are also the least perturbed. We must remind ourselves as concerned citizens that we can only do so much at the individual and community levels. Massive investments by fossil fuel companies are driving plastic production to alarming heights, creating a persistent environmental threat.

We are David and Goliath is armed to the teeth.

I often feel helpless or hopeless, or both at once. As usual, I turn to literature and other arts to help me process my climate grief and anxiety. They remind me that Mother Earth is a generous and forgiving teacher. They encourage me that I can’t single-handedly save the planet, but I can 'read softly' (to borrow from The Tempest) so as to leave the smallest possible trace—or, as Caliban says in the same play, so that 'the blind mole may not / Hear a foot fall'.

One masterpiece in which I have found comfort and inspiration is The Overstory by American author, Richard Powers. This potent work of activism is also a passionate novel that pays tribute to the grandeur of the natural world.

Powers tells us, for example, that a half-millennium-old Douglas-fir will

send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.

Powers calls these 'ancient benefactors giving trees'.

And this, to me, is what makes a forest enchanted. When compared with human greed, the generosity of our forest kin (I’m told we share some DNA with trees) is nothing short of magical.

Not only do trees give to their own, they also give to us—a fact illustrated in Shel Silverstein's poignant story, The Giving Tree, about a boy whose fickle love for a tree is met with the tree’s unconditional love for the boy. The tree gives without ceasing for decades until all that is visibly left of him is the lowest part of his trunk.

‘I don’t need very much now’, said the boy, ‘just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired’.
‘Well’, said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, ‘well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest’.
And the boy did.
And the tree was happy.

There is so much we can learn from trees. Generosity, for one, as Silverstein's giving tree teaches us. Trees also model good will, though this is not the lesson Richard Powers intended in his passage below, where he frames the interaction between trees and humans as a bribe:

Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. … When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you.

I like to think that the relationship is a little more nuanced than a harshly transactional bribe. Perhaps we can view it as a reciprocal support system—a quid pro quo. When you're good to Mama (when you move respectfully and lovingly through her lands), Mama's good to you.

We can also learn loving stewardship from trees. The German forest scientist, Peter Wohlleben, tells us that

the trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.

Love and care also pulse through the animated short film, Forevergreen. This Oscar-nominated movie is about an orphaned bear cub who forges a friendship with a loving tree. If it sounds anthropomorphic, it is. Forevergreen is part allegory, I think, and the bear is a stand-in for us.

The film’s soundscape is wordless, yet the final frame seizes our attention with a text, from the bible of all places:

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friend.

Drop everything and watch this 13-minute film now, and then please tread softly on this blessed earth. Go for a walk in an enchanted wood and listen closely. As Powers reminds us,

Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

References

Olzmann, M. (2017). Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/poem/letter-someone-living-fifty-years-now

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, scene 1. Folger Shakespeare Library. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/2/1/

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The Tempest. Folger Shakespeare Library. Retrieved March 20, 2026, from https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/

Silverstein, S. (1964). The giving tree. HarperCollins.

Wohlleben, P. (2017). The hidden life of trees: What they feel, how they communicate – discoveries from a secret world (J. Billinghurst, Trans.). David Suzuki Institute.

Fed up with my own fear
Fear also reaches some kind of threshold
After which something new begins

from She Speaks by Anastasia Afanasieva

In these lines, part of a collection of creative responses to the Russo-Ukrainian war, the poet expresses a deep frustration with her sense of dread. Rather than dwelling on it, she rejects it, stepping into the liminal space at the edge of fear, where she finds the promise of renaissance. Rebirth. The beginning of something new.

Through these lines, Afanasieva assures me that there is a place beyond fear that isn’t beyond hope.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, I have grappled with a sense of helplessness, leading me to seek out ways to celebrate Ukrainian culture and support advocacy efforts.

I have also turned to art that explores the effects of this war on the land and her human and other-than-human inhabitants. I ache for the Ukrainian people as well as for the innocent civilians of Russia and neighbouring Belarus whose lives have also been brutally and senselessly disrupted.

Countless wars since the turn of the twentieth century alone have resulted in the deaths of somewhere in the range of 200 million people, depending on what source you look at, but of course the number is probably much higher and likely doesn’t include the deaths related to PTSD and other mental health issues triggered by the trauma of war. And it most certainly does not consider the deaths of ecosystems and all our beleaguered planet's inhabitants.

Until recently, I have been personally unaffected by war. At least, I have never lived in a conflict zone, and neither has my immediate biological family. No one close to me has died in active combat. But today, war feels a little closer. The Globe & Mail reported last month that, improbable though experts say it is, an American-led invasion of Canada is not impossible, and the Canadian Armed Forces are preparing accordingly (Fife & Gavin, 2026, para. 1).

The Guardian also recently featured US–Canada relations in the wake of America’s attempts at ‘regional dominance’, reporting that the United States devised a plan to invade Canada in 1930, and that recent actions by the current US administration are ‘reviving old fears’ (Cecco, 2026).

Still, war on Canadian soil is hypothetical. And although I share the sense of insecurity many living in Canada feel, my reasons for steeping myself in art about war are unrelated. Instead, these works of art help me grapple with a violence that beggars all belief and understand what I can do in the face of it.

With that in mind, I turn to a focused reflection on art and war. But where to start? So much art is about war. To shape this post, I found it a compelling exercise to start with the works of art that sprung to mind unbidden, allowing them to shape my reflection. Here are just a few.

In Flanders Fields is a poem about sacrifice in the First World War by Canadian physician and soldier John McCrae. At least once upon a time, almost every school-aged child in Canada committed it to memory. I can never get past the short poem’s second stanza without my voice cracking with emotion:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
        Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
                In Flanders fields.

Being aligned with pacifist movements, I cannot, as the poem urges, take up the torch they throw from failing hands in any literal sense. I come by this anti-war stance honestly. My maternal grandfather was a conscientious objector during the Second World War and served by working in the Victory Gardens in Ottawa, which provided food for the war effort.

The poem also asks us to take up the soldiers’ quarrel with the foe. I am too old and probably too disabled to join the Armed Forces, and in any case I’m a pacifist, as I’ve already said.

So, what can I do? Well, I can remember—and to remember is to strive for peace.

I don’t know how to strive for peace. I don’t even know if peace is possible. But I must never give up trying to figure it out. And in the meantime, I can support, for example, persons displaced by war and others in need of humanitarian assistance.

My own tiny province has seen the recent arrival of over 2,200 Ukrainians and nearly 800 Afghans as well as hundreds of asylum seekers from around the world. I stand beside them as best I can as they face new foes, including xenophobia, cultural ignorance, and apathy. I also try to learn smatterings of languages so I can at least stammer out greetings in Ukrainian (pryveet), Russian (preevyet), Afghan Persian (salam alaikum), Arabic (marhaba), and so on.

Side note: having hit middle-age, I also promptly forget the words I learn, but Google Translate, along with its pronunciation option (flawed as it may be), is a gift from the tech gods at whose altar I worship from time to time.

***

The award-winning 20 Days in Mariupol is a not-for-the-faint-of-heart documentary film directed by Mstyslav Chernov and released in 2023. Drawing on personal footage, Chernov reveals in heart-breaking detail the atrocities recorded by Associated Press journalists trapped in Mariupol in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The film captures scenes that have come to define the war, including the bombing of a maternity hospital.

I am serious when I say I was sobbing—sobbing—as the film rolled. I had to press 'pause' on multiple occasions to compose myself as the resolutely sorrowful scenes unfolded. I couldn’t see the screen through my tears and in any case I was crying too hard to take it all in.

Why make this film? Why watch it? Why weep like this at this moment, in this film, when everywhere we are assaulted with images from this and other wars? Why am I not too desensitized to react?

The answer lies in the power of story. Chernov relates with raw honesty a dozen or more micro-stories of a city under siege. The human capacity to respond emotionally to the story of another human or other living thing is greater than our ability to react viscerally to the more abstract.

If you’re not so sure, consider this uplifting example: the 1993 hit film Free Willy, about a child who bonds with a captive killer whale in danger. Free Willy ignited a major animal rights movement focused on liberating marine mammals. As the story goes, Keiko—the whale playing Willy—became the first captive orca ever released into the open ocean. Keiko traveled over 1,500 kilometres across the Atlantic, feeding himself and splashing about rather merrily after twenty-some years of confinement.

This is an abstract concept (animal abuse) related in human, humane terms (Keiko the Killer Whale). It is a vague thing given flesh and a heartbeat. And it works miracles. Similarly, 20 Days in Mariupol is the abstract concept of war portrayed in deeply human terms. This is story.

And story is medicine. And sometimes medicine tastes awful. It might even make us feel worse before it makes us better. I came out of that story refined as if by fire. Scorched. Burned even. But still alive. And more determined than ever to love and to teach love. To resist hate.

When Chernov accepted the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature (the first Oscar for a Ukrainian film), he said:

I cannot change history. I cannot change the past. But we all together, you—some of the most talented people in the world—can make sure the history record is set straight and the truth will prevail and the people of Mariupol and those who have lost their lives will never be forgotten.

***

One more. The 1956 stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, based on the book of the same name by the teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s play dramatizes her time in hiding.

In the final scene, Anne’s father, who has been reading her now-famous diary aloud throughout the play, finds he can read no further. Not because the pain is too great, though it is. His eye falls on a sentence: In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart, and he speaks aloud as he closes the diary: 'She puts me to shame'. Mr. Frank is ashamed of his bitterness and pessimism in the face of her courage. Her optimism. Her belief in the goodness of humankind.

Of course, we understand why he feels as he does. We, too, are outraged for him. The man lived through the horrors of the Second World War only to lose his entire immediate family to the Holocaust. We wouldn’t even ask him to try to see things differently.

I saw this play two or three times in the late 1990s, and it has never left me. Why? Because it gently reminded me then, and persists in reminding me now, about how bitter I can be. How skeptical. How enraged—and I have lived through nothing even remotely close to the Holocaust.

Sure, people have hurt me. Badly. We don’t need to live in Nazi Germany to have had our faith in humanity eroded. Who hasn’t faced bullying, endured racist or queer/transphobic taunts, been fat-shamed, suffered assault, been mocked, or been made to feel small, invisible, or otherwise unworthy?

But, if Anne Frank can believe people are really good at heart, then surely I can strive to do the same. And do. En masse, we seem to be a terrible animal—but spend enough time with any of us individually and you almost always find something to like. To be inspired by. To believe in.

***

To close, I return to She Speaks, with which I began: ‘something new begins’, she says. The poet takes up this point again in the poem’s final lines:

Life beyond fear
Fearlessness on the verge of death.

After fear, something new begins. How do artists in the thick of war feel hope? How do they feel the beginning of something new? I don’t know the answer. I hope I never have to experience a war to find out. But, like Anne Frank, Anastasia Afanasieva is optimistic and determined. She hasn’t given up. She awaits life after fear.

In the middle of fear—and this I know intimately—we often feel there is no escape. The burning building we are in, figuratively speaking, has no obvious exits. The curtain of smoke is too thick. The wall of heat is too dense. But wait! There is one small window, and emergency responders are below, dousing the flames. One firefighter is ascending a ladder. We are not alone. All we have to do is summon the courage to lean out the window and begin our descent.

Life waits for us on the other side of the threshold.

Bibliography

Afanasieva, A. (2015). She Speaks (Transl. O. Livshin & A. Janco). Words for War. Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from https://www.wordsforwar.com/she-speaks

Cecco, L. (2026, Jan. 27). The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Now Trump is reviving old fears. The Guardian (Online). Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/trump-canada-us-war-plan

Fife, R., & Gavin, J. (2026, Jan. 20). Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion. The Globe and Mail (Online). Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.mta.ca/blogs-podcasts-websites/military-models-canadian-response-hypothetical/docview/3294922317/se-2

Goodrich, F., & Hackett, A. (1956). The Diary of Anne Frank. Dramatists Play Service Inc.

McRae, J. In Flanders Fields. The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved Feb. 11, 2026, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

This post began as an attempt to consider ‘what sexes read whom and why’, a curiosity piqued by a finding published in The Guardian:

women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women.
(Nielsen Book Research 2021).

In my surroundings, this is categorically untrue. I rarely see my father, for example, without a book by a female author in hand, and I will associate the names of those revered writers of detective fiction, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with my dad until my last breath.

But my plan to ponder the question of sexes and reading soon crystallized, like frost on glass, wending its way upward and outward in shimmering threads and metamorphosing into something unexpectedly personal: a reflection on the women writers who helped raise me, who challenged my assumptions, and who transformed the way I think and act.

These women hover at the edges of my vision as constant guides. Although they include a predictable cast—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Shelley—the ones I write about in this brief chronicle are luminaries who seem more magical by virtue of being somewhat less known. There are prose writers, yes, but there are also playwrights and, above all, poets.

Jeanette Winterson writes that poetry is ‘a finding place’, and so it was, and is, for me. The first poet I recall reading, or hearing read, is Rachel Field, a woman who marvels in the mystery of not knowing. ‘Something Told the Wild Geese’ awoke my five-year-old senses to the wonder of seasonal change. Field offered me a conception of the world as a place of magical transformation, and she achieved this with a single word, pregnant with possibility: something.

Something told the wild geese it was time to fly.
Summer sun was in their wings, winter in their cry.

Every year when those magnificent V-formations of Canada Geese wing their way toward warmer climes across a boundless sky, I recall the words of this poem.

As I grew a little older and experienced my first sucker punches of betrayal, I learned about forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—from Patricia St. John’s Treasures of the Snow, the story of two Alpine children, Annette and Lucien, whose lives are altered by a tragic accident. Guilt and rage tear apart their already fractured relationship before a harrowing adventure ultimately leads to forgiveness and redemption. The lessons from Annette’s wise grandmother, who tries to foster forgiveness in an embittered Annette, stay with me the most:

When love comes in, hatred and selfishness and unkindness will give way to it, just as the darkness gives way when you let in the sunshine.

I was struck by Annette’s capacity for both goodness and vindictiveness because even at a young age I was aware of a confusing feeling of two selves inhabiting my small body—one generous and one vengeful. Much later, Denise Levertov helped me understand and accept this duality. From her, I realized that I can be both a ‘woman of innocence’ who is ‘kind and very clean without / ostentation’ and a ‘turbulent moon-ridden girl’ who is not. Ridding myself of one is not possible, for trying to fly from myself is futile. When we are in a fight against ourselves, peace can only come from the laying down of arms.

My love for poetry endures, but during my teens I began devouring plays, from which I learned life-shaping imperatives. Lilian Hellman’s Southern Gothic drama, The Little Foxes is a portrayal of greed and treachery in early-1900s Alabama. Regina’s drive for wealth pits her against her avaricious brothers and leads her to betray her dying husband. I view greed as the root of all evil. It destroys families, communities, nations, and the environment. It affects all living things, even the top brass (though they seem to deny its repercussions). In The Little Foxes, Addie, the family’s housemaid and the play’s moral centre observes,

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then, there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly.) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.

I can’t change all the world’s evils, but I can choke greed in my small circle of influence by modelling generosity. Doing nothing simply ain’t right.

The plays also evolved my understanding of racism, and especially anti-Black racism. My hometown had deep racial divisions, but the violent words and deeds were mostly directed at newcomers from India and Pakistan. My community had very few Black people and so the heinous form of White Supremacy connected with Black bodies was revealed to me in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about the Youngers, a Black family in 1950s Chicago whose dreams of upward social mobility are thwarted at every turn.

As a teenager reading A Raisin in the Sun, I would have said I wasn't racist, and I would have argued passionately that the best way to end racism was simple: don't be racist. I didn't know that we are all racist to varying degrees and that ‘not being racist’ isn’t good enough: we are complicit in racism if we are not actively striving to change it. To be anti-racist is to step so far out of our comfort zones we don’t know how we’ll ever return, and we won’t even be sure that we’ll want to.

As much as A Raisin in the Sun taught me about anti-Black racism, the play's centring of forgiveness is just as powerful. As I also learned from Treasures of the Snow, love is the highest law, even when others have hurt us—though in the play this is not in the context of racism. The twenty-year-old Beneatha Younger is livid with a family member who has badly hurt her and the family. Her mother—Mama—calls on her to love. Beneatha can’t fathom why or how. Mama says,

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he’s done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest … and he can’t believe in hisself because the world’s whipped him so!

These plays and others like them didn’t only influence the way I move through the world. They also fostered in me a deep love for theatre as a craft and led to my doctoral studies in drama and my work in professional theatre.

Anyone who has set their mind to a seemingly impossible task knows the feeling of overwhelm I experienced as I pursued my doctorate degree. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird inspired me whenever a deluge of reading threatened to drown me. The title comes from a piece of parental wisdom: when Lamott’s brother felt overwhelmed by a gigantic school report on birds, his father told him, ‘Bird by bird, buddy’. I held this maxim close and worked through my research book by book.

Another, more horrific form of overwhelm is one we experience with grief. My adult life has been strangely punctuated by the sudden and violent deaths of friends, and consequently I have often sought out literature that helps me work through spasms of shock and grief.

The Nobel Prize winning novelist Han Kang helps me by articulating truths too agonizing for me to put words to. The White Book, Kang’s lyrical meditation on colour but also on grief, perfectly encapsulates how we move through the pain of loss:

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

Jackie Kay's achingly poignant poem, ‘Darling’, is a constant solace: ‘The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.’ Why are we loved ones? Who are we to the poet? Is it because we are bound together as a community reckoning with grief? In the same poem, as well as in her novel, Trumpet, she cites the lyrics of a Scottish choral piece, The Mingulay Boat Song: ‘Heel y’ho boys. Let her go boys’. The first sentence might be read as ‘Heave ho, boys’, and the idea of working together through adversity resonates with me—and ‘let her go boys’ even more. Sometimes the dead needed to die. But as long as they live in our memory, they are also ‘still here holding our hands' (‘Darling’).

Grief is an ever-present companion, but so too is love—of people, of the natural world, of cityscapes and adventure and coffee and dark red wine. And words. Always words. In An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich inspires me to love all language even when its sense eludes us:

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

I used to interpret these lines figuratively, understanding them to extend to reading in languages we don't understand or appreciating stunning imagery in an otherwise confounding work. As I reread them literally now, I am struck by how much more poignant they have become as my parents and partner all confront eye conditions and I myself have moved into a world of advanced myopia and double vision.

It feels impossible to stop. I haven’t yet argued for songwriters as poets and articulated how their lyrics changed and change me (Alanis Morisette—'you took me out to wine dine sixty-nine me / but didn't hear a damn word I said'—and Sarah McLachlan—'you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie'). I haven’t referenced Marjane Satrapi whose portrayal of perseverance and self-acceptance sustains me (Persepolis) or the ways in which Louise Erdrich inspires me to yield to the moment (The Plague of Doves) and Aemilia Bassano (Lanyer) charges me to be proud of the knowledge that I seek (Salve Deus).

But stop I must, so I end with a great assertion of agency from the poet, Adrienne Rich (‘XXI’):

I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here.

Bibliography

Erdrich, L. The Plague of Doves. HarperCollins, 2008.

Field, R. Something Told the Wild Geese. Macmillan, 1942.

Hansberry, L. A Raisin in the Sun. Random House, 1959.

Hellman, L. The Little Foxes. Random House, 1939.

Kang, H. The White Book. Translated by Deborah Smith, Hogarth, 2018.

Kay, J. “Darling.” Darling: New and Selected Poems. Boodaxe Book, 2007.

———. Trumpet. Picador, 1998.

Lanyer, A. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. First published 1611. Edited by S. M. Woods, Penguin Classics, 1993.

Levertov, D. “In Mind.” Poetry, vol. 102, no. 1–2, p. 68, Oct.–Nov. 1963.

McLachlan, S. “Angel.” Surfacing, Nettwerk/Arista Records, 1997.

Morissette, A. “You See Right Through Me.” Jagged Little Pill, Maverick, 1995.

Rich, A. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–91. W. W. Norton, 1991.

———. Twenty-One Love Poems. Effie’s Press, 1976.

Sieghart, M. A. “Why Do So Few Men Read Books by Women?” The Guardian, 9 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women

St. John, P. M. Treasures of the Snow. CSSM, 1950.

Winterson, J. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Press, 2011.

It is that time of year when giant inflatable Grinches assume control of front lawns. They billow incongruously over diminutive lambs, kneeling in a dusting of snow and the promise of a White Christmas. The sheep gaze adoringly at a White baby in a plastic manger, his arms raised towards White parents, who many social conservatives note look just like them. Mary's robe is so pristine. There is no hint in her placid face of the refugee she is soon to become, fleeing the violent whims of a jealous king.

But I digress, because it is December, and my starting point was supposed to be Charles Dickens, though not, as one might have thought, that wonderful tale about miserliness and redemption, A Christmas Carol, but rather a more devastating tale of two cities.

In a climactic scene near the end of the book, a loyal governess called Miss Pross ferociously protects her charge, Lucie Manette, against a life-threatening intruder named Madame Defarge. Dickens describes it thus in his moving novel of sacrifice and second chances, A Tale of Two Cities (1859):

Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate, clasped her tight and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle that they had.

I am inspired by Miss Pross's courage, fuelled by the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate. Today, hate seems to be winning, and all too often it is unleashed by the very groups who claim to worship that beatific baby in a manger.

Even Canada, a nation with a global reputation for politesse, has seen a calamitous rise in hate crimes, with police-reported incidents more than doubling since 2019. Many acts of hate are fuelled by religious intolerance, especially antisemitism and Islamophobia, but Canada has also experienced a surge in hate crimes targeting Two Spirit, queer, and trans individuals. Anti-Asian hate crimes have also risen sharply since the onset of COVID-19. 

And then there is the hatred directed at those experiencing homelessness. It isn't always violent in a physical sense, though the unhoused population in Canada faces many vicious attacks. Feelings of resentment or animosity and prejudiced thinking are also hate. So is discrimination embedded in policies and laws. 

Where is our vigorous tenacity of love? The roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-angry love? I call this muscular love. It's the love that refuses to judge on the basis of difference, that speaks out against racism, religious intolerance, sexism, queer- and trans-phobia, ageism, and so on. Love doesn't turn away when it is afraid. Love runs towards in spite of personal risk. 

If personal risk feels too big, remember this: not all muscular love is dangerous love. Hiring the kid with the single mom to shovel your driveway or visiting a lonely senior citizen are also acts of love. These, too, are running towards.

Reflecting on these loving actions calls to mind an appeal I heard innumerable times as a child, in a story about a man sometimes called the Good Shepherd: Feed my sheep, he said to his friend, Peter. If you love me, feed my lambs. In an age of profound hunger, sharing our food is a radical act.

The Good Shepherd stands among good company. I like the kindred spirits he might find in the shepherds and cowherds of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim stories who also embody loving care. The Prophet Muhammed is said to have remarked that every prophet has tended sheep. I see this kind of prophet as a figure to whom we might all aspire: one who perceives hidden truths and possesses the courage to utter them.

Stories of brave and loving caretakers abound across cultures, religions, geographies, languages, and peoples. When I feel the weight of the world's hate on my shoulders, I hang onto these stories and am heartened by the vigorous tenacity of love.

So here's to us doing our best to love in an age of hate. Love is stronger. We are stronger. Happy Holidays to you, and may Miss Pross's lion-hearted love guide us through the season.

It is October and the air is cool. Here in Atlantic Canada, we are — I deeply hope — nearing the end of a season of drought and wildfires. Crops were decimated as heat and flame ripped across the province at distressing rates. The lives of countless animals, including humans, were imperilled and the food security of those already made most vulnerable was severely compromised. I write in the past tense, as July and August are behind us, but summer's devastation has nevertheless grabbed autumn by the throat.

The fire and famine of which I write are regional disasters, rendered miniscule when held up against the catastrophes happening globally. Jumping quickly to mind are the violent conflicts being enacted on various parts of this beloved planet, directed by dangerous and self-serving 'leaders' — a title they neither embody nor deserve. The scale of Eastern Canada's devastation is likewise diminished when I consider other heart-shattering tragedies playing out elsewhere: mass shootings, for example, or the terrifying erosion of democracy.

Though we may have secure professions and sit well-fed; though we may live thousands of kilometres from war and other violent clashes, we are not exempt from grief, from a gnawing sense of loss. How do we cope in such difficult times?

To help me, I often turn to a passage in T.H. White's 1958 novel, The Once and Future King. In the excerpt below, Merlin — the beloved magician who teaches a young Arthur all he holds dear — offers an inspiring lesson to the boy who will one day rule Britain:

"The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Accordingly, I have begun choosing activities from a list I created in the Notes app on my phone called Things to Learn. This month, I have picked up French study again after a hiatus. I am also beginning to look for First Aid courses, as my certification is woefully out of date. This was inspired by a recent incident in a local park, where I encountered a person lying motionless, face down, in an ornamental fountain. I ran over to help, knowing I was ignorant of the best course of action. (Good news! The person was OK.)

Not on my list, but things I'm also doing to offset the sadness include: practising new forms in haidong gumdo (Korean sword fighting), and reading a gorgeously contemplative novel — Greek Lessons — by the celebrated Korean writer, Han Kang. She reminds me in her finely-wrought prose of the lifegiving forces of language and human connection. 

Merlin was right! I'm feeling better already.

For information about a poetry workshop Julie Sutherland is facilitating on collective, private, and ecological grief, click here. Hosted by the London Literary Salon.